Service Career
U-5 and U-6 were both commissioned into the Austro-Hungarian Navy by April 1910, and served as training boats through 1914, making as many as ten training cruises per month. During their early years, each boat was demonstrated to a foreign naval delegation; U-5 to a Peruvian detachment in 1911, U-6 to a Norwegian group in 1910. At the beginning of World War I in August 1914, U-5 and U-6 comprised half of the operational U-boat fleet of the Austro-Hungarian Navy.
In the three years after SS-3's March 1911 launch, Whitehead's attempted to sell the boat to the navies of Peru, Portugal, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Bulgaria, before the Austro-Hungarian Navy rejected an offer for the second time. With the outbreak of war, however, the Austro-Hungarian Navy purchased the unsold submarine to quickly bolster its fleet. Although provisionally commissioned as U-7, she was commissioned as U-12 in August 1914.
By late December 1914, all three of the U-5-class boats were based at the naval base at Cattaro and all took part in combat patrols. Between the three boats, they sank five ships with a combined tonnage of 22,391, captured seven ships, and damaged one dreadnought. U-6 was the least successful, sinking a single ship of 756 GRT; U-5 was the most successful, sinking four ships with of a combined 21,604 GRT, including the French armoured cruiser Léon Gambetta. U-12 damaged, but did not sink, the largest ship torpedoed by any of the U-5 class when she hit the French battleship Jean Bart on 21 December 1914.
Of the three boats of the class, only U-5 survived the war intact. U-12 was sunk with the loss of all hands when she hit a mine near Venice in August 1915, while U-6 was scuttled by her crew in May 1916 after becoming trapped in an anti-submarine net that was a part of the Otranto Barrage. U-5 herself sank after hitting an Austro-Hungarian mine during a training exercise, but was raised, repaired and recommissioned before the war's end. U-5 was ceded to Italy as a war reparation and scrapped in 1920.
Read more about this topic: U-5 Class Submarine (Austria-Hungary)
Famous quotes containing the words service and/or career:
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)